Meet A Decades-Old Software Company Hitching A Ride On The NVIDIA Rocket Ship
Business Insider, Wednesday, March 26th, 2025
The AI boom is changing the trajectory of decades-old computing companies. DDN, known in the supercomputing field, now offers crucial data storage for AI data centers. The company recently raised $300 million from Blackstone at a $5 billion valuation.
As Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang gave his keynote address at the company's annual GTC conference to an audience of roughly 17,000 people in San Jose, California, last week, dozens of companies sat on the edge of their seats to find out if they'd get a mention. Some had a glimpse of the slides ahead of time, but no one knew for certain until the words came out of Huang's mouth.
DataDirect Networks, or DDN, was one of the lucky ones to leave the arena happy. Huang named the company alongside Dell, HP Enterprise, Hitachi, and IBM. But while those firms have enjoyed broader name recognition in the tech world for decades, DDN was invited on the rocket ship that is Nvidia just a few years ago - and everything changed.